Popular Culture Review
104
Prints
Wall Clocks
Fridge Magnets
Posters
Coffee Mugs
Playing Cards
Fabric/Quilts
Collector Plates
Dog Collars
Pillowcases
Ties
Poker Chips
T-shirts
Ashtrays
Sheets
Video Games
Chip Deck Rack
Boxer Shorts
Metal signs
Address Labels
Badges/Buttons
Salt and Pepper
Shakers
Window curtains
Switch Plate Covers
Calendars
Throw Pillows
Toilet Scat Covers
Not enough? You want something more personal than underwear or
toilet seat covers? There is one company that invites you to send them a
photograph of your dog: the image will be integrated into the crowd of dogs
around the poker table and you will receive back a framed painting of your
“Fido” for the wall above the dining room table.
C.M. Coolidge may be the most famous American artist that Americans
have never heard of. Yet his paintings are more familiar to Americans today
than the more celebrated works of Edward Hopper {Nighthawks), Grant Wood
{American Gothic), or Andy Warhol {Campbell Soup Cans) (Ferrara, 2006).
Even for those people who have never entered an art museum in their lives,
Coolidge’s signature piece is immediately recognized simply because it has been
reproduced so many times and on so many popular-culture items (Ferrara,
2006).
Coolidge’s most famous painting, now over a century old, of seven
smoking, drinking, card-playing dogs has been an essential piece of decor in
basement recreation rooms for decades (Ferrara, 2006). However, it is rarely
referred to by its real title, A Friend in Need. Today, it is simply known by the
pop-culture title, “Dogs Playing Poker.” As famous as the picture has become, it
is more likely to be found in a thrift store or at a garage sale, rather than in a
museum of American art (Ferrara, 2006). And through the years there have been
so many variations of the poker-playing dogs that it is difficult to imagine there
was once an artist who created the original painting (Ferrara, 2006).
Cassius Marcellus Coolidge was bom in upstate New York in 1844. As
a young man in the 1860s, “Cash” (as he was known), attempted many different
careers and money-making ventures (Ferrara, 2006). He tried his hand at being a
druggist, a painter of street signs and house numbers, an art teacher, and a
cartoonist. He wrote a comic opera about a New Jersey mosquito epidemic,
founded a bank, and started a small newspaper called the Antwerp News. He did
all of this before 1872 (Ferrara, 2006).
In 1873, Coolidge took up residence in Rochester, New York; there he
began the next phase of his life as a painter of vice-loving dogs that had a
penchant for gambling (Ferrara, 2006). The first interest in Coolidge’s dog
paintings were cigar companies who printed copies of them for giveaways. But
then in 1903, the Brown & Bigelow “remembrance advertising” company from